Job CXIV

 When they’re between a rock and a hard place, people make all manner of promises to God that they never intend to keep. Let me pass this test, and I will serve you the rest of my days! Once the test is passed, they quickly forget the promise they made until the next time they need an intervention or some supernatural remedy to their situation. That’s not surrender, obedience, or the pursuit of righteousness; that’s usury, and what’s worse is that many think God naïve enough to fall for it.

I’ve never been in a foxhole, so I could not attest to the veracity of the claim, but it sounds right, nevertheless. There are no atheists in a foxhole. When the bullets start whizzing by, and you see people crumble to the left and the right of you, the much-vaunted agnosticism or atheism so many proclaimed goes out the window. It may not be that one has a change of heart and runs into the arms of Jesus, but their narrow view of existence suddenly expands, allowing for the possibility, even the hope, that there is something more beyond living a handful of years and then rotting beneath a few feet of dirt.

God isn’t some out-of-the-way trading post where you make an offer, and He counters. We’ve become so arrogant as to assume that we can barter with God and insist that our intermittent, halfhearted, situational commitment is worth far more than anything we would ask of Him, so it would be in His best interest to acquiesce to every want and desire we might have in exchange for occasionally referencing Him.

When an entire generation amplifies its own self-importance while simultaneously diminishing what Jesus did on the cross, you have multitudes of people fully convinced that they’re doing God a favor by humbling themselves and pursuing Him. In all honesty, even the notion of humbling oneself has gone the way of the buggy whip because there are enough wolves insisting that you need do nothing more than raise your hand or nod your head in order to receive what Jesus bled and died for to facilitate.

If we were to fully understand what it means to be saved and crystalize in our hearts and minds what we were saved from and that we needed a savior, we would prostrate ourselves before His lovingkindness and mercy with humble and obedient hearts in perpetuity. No man can save himself. It doesn’t matter how good, noble, charitable, or kind one might be; those things do not save. Only Christ can, and only by denying ourselves, picking up our crosses, and following after Him can we attain salvation.

The sad reality is that Jesus is still reaching out, offering to pull souls out of the quicksand of sin, and more often than not, they are slapping His hand away because they do not acknowledge the danger and the terminal condition they find themselves in. Without shaking off the filthy rags of our own righteousness and clothing ourselves in His, our chances of survival are zero. It’s not a fifty-fifty probability that if one dies in their sins, they will be eternally removed from the presence of God; it’s not even a ninety-ten split, but a 100% certainty, one hundred percent of the time.

It takes a certain kind of hubris to acknowledge that only Christ can save our souls from eternal damnation and then ask for more. Heaven is all well and good, but where is my overflow of legal tender? Granted, it will be amazing to be present for the marriage supper of the Lamb, but I’ve had my eye on this new Beemer for the longest time. Can you make that happen, too?

Back before the girls were born when I used to travel extensively, I’d catch episodes of a television show called Antiques Roadshow. I don’t know if it’s still on the air, but the show's premise was quite interesting. A group of experts in various fields having to do with antiques traveled the country appraising the value of items people brought to them, whether from having been passed down or having been acquired at a sale or a store.

The funny thing was that more often than not, the items people brought that they were certain would retire them and allow them to live comfortably evermore turned out to be of little value. Conversely, some things people held out no hope of being valuable beyond a family heirloom turned out to be worth tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 When we come to understand what God values, the entire paradigm of our priorities inevitably shifts. If I come before God in my own righteousness, asking what it’s worth, the answer will be nothing. If I come before Him clothed in Christ and standing in His righteousness, asking what it’s worth, He will answer everything. Between obedience and sacrifice, God prizes obedience, knowing that if I walk in obedience when called upon to sacrifice, it will be no great thing. Between seeking glory for myself or seeking to bring glory to His name, He will look upon the latter with joy while dismissing the former offhand.

God places no value on the flesh, for it is dust. There is no inherent value in it beyond what we do with the handful of years we are given to walk the earth. The soul of man, however, is priceless indeed, and its value is commensurate with the sacrifice made on its behalf so that it may be reconciled to Him.

When we prioritize the earthen vessel over what it contains within, when we focus on making the flesh as comfortable and at ease as possible, we are diminishing the worth and value of what was placed within. Don’t focus on the box, but the treasure the box comes in. The box will go the way of all things, but the treasure contained therein is eternal and of eternal import. 

2 Corinthians 4:7, “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.”

Even though Bildad came out and accused Job of forgetting God, we would be remiss if we did not point out that every word that came out of Job’s mouth thus far was regarding God, His authority, power, sovereignty, but also mysterious ways which man cannot plumb the depths of.

It’s as though Bildad dismissed every word Job spoke and, in the pride of his own ignorance, insisted that the root cause of Job’s travails was that he’d forgotten God. It doesn’t matter what you say; I know what I know, and the experiences of all those who came before us support my thesis. Therefore, you’ve forgotten God because all these things came upon you.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.